You Can Turn Your iPhone’s Glass Plate Into A Beautiful Piece Of Film

You Can Turn Your iPhone’s Glass Plate Into A Beautiful Piece Of Film


If you think if you have a cool iPhone case, it’s not as awesome as this: Jake Potts, a photographer, converted the glass back of an iPhone to a collodion process wet plate. Meaning, he effectively turned the glass of an iPhone into film and shot a picture onto it. Check it out.

Here’s how Potts managed to ‘print’ a photo onto his iPhone back plate (remember, the collodion wet plate process of taking pictures came out in the 1850’s so this technique is effectively ancient):

To make an ambrotype, a piece of glass is coated with salted collodion, sensitised, placed into a camera and exposed like a piece of film. Then back in the darkroom, the glass plate is developed, fixed and washed.


Potts cleaned the back plate of the iPhone with a mixture of Calcium Carbonate, water and alcohol and then poured the collodion over the glass. After the collodion is on the back plate, the picture has to be shot before the collodion dries up. Potts’ process continued on:

After the collodion is on the plate, it has to be sensitised, shot, and developed before the collodion dries, which is probably 10-15 minutes. Once sensitized, it has to stay in the dark to be loaded in the holder. The holder is then taken to the camera fitted with a lens that dates to 1872 (woah, camera nerd alert!) and the exposure is made. Back in the darkroom, the plate is taken out and developed. Development times are fast, around 15 seconds (unlike film which takes minutes).

In the end, Potts got an iPhone that’s unlike any iPhone in the world because it used a centuries old technique in making it unique. So very awesome. [Bruton Stroube via PetaPixel]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.